


Oh Ariadne

by WIN



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Gen, Introspection, Past Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5580073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WIN/pseuds/WIN
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s so funny?” Handsome Jack demanded, when he realized the corners of Angel’s mouth were twitching even though he hadn’t said a word. That had taken him a few seconds, too; she wondered how much the amount he actually listened to himself would weigh up against how much he just wanted to make sure everyone else had to listen to him.</p><p>(A companion piece to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5472458">Dear Damocles</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh Ariadne

**Author's Note:**

> I really enjoyed writing about Timothy's life for Yuletide, so I wanted to try the idea out from a different angle (thanks, subconscious, for that wordplay). I think Angel and Timothy are similar people trying to function under different sets of unpleasant circumstances as Hyperion's more core 'employees', neither of which worked out very well for either of them, and I like to think they'd have gotten along.

Angel had a lot of time to think.

It wasn’t that she would say she was bitter about her life; counselors on the ECHOnet preached the gospel of forgiveness and how it could set you free so fervently that she almost wanted to believe them, almost wanted to say that she believed in her father, almost considered him the hero he thought he was.

Almost.

But she had been given too much time to think, too much time alone with herself to honestly believe that this prison was anything but a long con even the con artist had bought shares in. The nauseating yellow barriers holding her in here were tall, and unbreakable, and the color purple made her sick.

Angel never stopped thinking.

♫

Sometimes Angel thought about the other Sirens.

Her father thought there were only six. No, she corrected herself, as Maya’s laughing face appeared on her monitor. _Handsome Jack_ thought there were only six.

Which was better, really. She’d pulled that number out of a hat, mixed the truth with the lies and let him pick up the implications she’d crafted as carefully as fake puzzle pieces. Sometimes the thought of a fairytale she’d told a liar becoming part of the galaxy’s consciously-accepted facts made Angel laugh — why would there ever only be _six_?

“What’s so funny?” Handsome Jack demanded, when he realized the corners of Angel’s mouth were twitching even though he hadn’t said a word. That had taken him a few seconds, too; she wondered how much the amount he actually listened to himself would weigh up against how much he just wanted to make sure everyone else had to listen to him.

A cold breeze swept through the room. Angel tried to remember the last time one of his jokes had made her laugh.

“I’m watching the Vault Hunters,” she said.

♫

When her friends finally came to the rescue, Angel was ready.

They fully didn’t understand what she needed them to do ( _what the world needed them to do_ ) when they broke down that tall barrier, but she did.

Angel had always known.

That didn’t make it less of an awful thing to ask them, she knew. She had tried rationalizing it to herself ( _they kill lots of other Hyperion employees_ ) over and over and over, but she knew these Vault Hunters were trying to be good people. She knew they were trying to give people choices and didn’t always make the right ones themselves, but she could appreciate the effort they were putting in. It couldn’t be easy to try.

More than anything, Angel wanted them to know that they had the freedom to make their own choices, though. She wanted them to know that this was a choice they would need to make, she told herself. On her tiny, cramped display screens, so much smaller than she remembered the rest of the world being, Roland barked out orders she didn’t have a microphone to hear.

She wanted them to make choices they’d be able to live with, even if their loved ones ( _and Angel could only hope they thought so highly of her_ ) needed to die.

A body double crept nervously into the room. Angel listened to his shuffling footsteps with an incline of her head, silent acknowledgement saving her from having to look at his regulation face.

“I’m one of the —“ he started. Lilith phased into nothingness, blinked into pure Eridium, and Angel’s gaze trailed her to the other side of the battlefield.

“I know who you are,” Angel said.

He was probably the oldest one, she thought. The college student with a loan debt that still hadn’t been paid — the one who’d been locked away almost as long as she had, who was probably here to take a bullet for the self-avowed King of Hyperion, should things even start to look dicey. Handsome Jack’s body doubles were a quadrupled-down failsafe plan to make sure that even if any day’s story ( _today’s story_ ) became one about bandits killing Handsome Jack, one about Hyperion crumbling to ashes under the weight of all those corpses piled on its back, then the monster living in her father’s discarded skin would still get to walk away.

But that monster was vain. It was selfish, and self-centered, and could never look past echoes of itself when it saw them in anyone else. It had looked past Angel all this time.

Angel wondered if she should tell this body double that Handsome Jack had killed his family so he’d have nowhere to run. She looked at the trembling fingers running through his slightly off-model haircut and wondered if he already knew.

With a wave of her hand, Handsome Jack’s best-laid backup plan disappeared into a carefully-shielded construct of nothingness, a space nothing would touch him, nobody would see him. The outline of the space he had been glowed faintly purple. Angel remembered Lilith’s copy of _Bunkers & Badasses_, Maya’s snorting laughter, Steele’s perfectly-preserved ECHOnet posts.

She had spent a lot of time thinking about how much Handsome Jack was afraid of dying.

She knew they both needed to.

♫

Death didn’t feel like anything.

There was no dramatic swelling of music, no sudden recollection of everything she’d ever loved and cared about.

The Vault Hunters were right there, anyway. Dreaming about her few good memories felt kind of useless when the people she’d made them with were all calling her name. Her gaze honed in on them as she struggled to make her body hold on enough to see the looks on their faces, to take in what they were thinking, feeling, saying, but she couldn’t do it. She thought about Eridium. She thought about Vaults. She thought about Sirens. She looked at Lilith. She looked at Maya. She looked for Commandant Steele.

She was cold, Angel realized, her whole body felt like she’d slipped underneath a crashing, roaring wave that was frosting her over to the deepest cracks in her bones. Angel remembered Aurelia. Angel wondered if this was how bandits felt when Aurelia killed them.

Handsome Jack pleaded with her. Her father clung onto himself at the edges of her sight. Her mother was gone. Both her parents were gone.

“Asshole,” Angel whispered.

Roland crumpled to the floor. Angel’s vision flickered into darkness. Everything about her started to melt into one fevered pitch of cold, cold, cold, and she listened to her hero die.

She listened for her father, her friends, her mother, herself.

And then the Warrior woke up, but she wasn’t Angel anymore.


End file.
